(16,000 words)
This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
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THE THIRD CULTURE
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There's new technology emerging from behavioral economics and we are just starting to make use of that. I thought the input of psychology into economics was finished but clearly it's not!
TWO BIG THINGS HAPPENING IN PSYCHOLOGY TODAY
A TALK BY DANIEL KAHNEMAN
EDGE Video
DANIEL KAHNEMAN, a psychologist at Princeton University, is the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his pioneering work integrating insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty. Daniel Kahneman's Edge Bio page: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/kahneman.html
Danny Hillis, Richard Thaler, Nathan Myhrvold, Elon Musk, France LeClerc, Salar Kamangar, Anne Treisman, Sendhil Mullainathan, Jeff Bezos, Sean Parker
Class 4
A Short Course In Behavioral Economics
DANIEL KAHNEMAN: I want to tell you a bit of straight psychology that I find very exciting, that I found more exciting this year than I had before, and that in some ways is changing my view about a lot of things in psychology.
There are two big things happening in psychology today. One, of course, is everything that's got to do with the brain, and that's dominating psychology. But there is something else that is happening, which started out from a methodological innovation as a way to study memory, and we've always known, that's the idea of the notion of association of ideas, which has been around for 350 years at least.
We know about how associations work because we have one thought, and when it leads to another windows and doors and things like that, or white and black and we have our ideas of associations, and it's always been recognized as important and interesting. But our view of how associations work has been changed in a profound way by a technical innovation, which is something that happens a great deal in psychology and I suppose in all sciences.
This innovation is the following: If, for example, you hear the word "sick", there are few associations that come to mind. But there are a number of other things that you can do, that are little more refined. You can present words, and measure the amount of time that it takes people to read the words. Or you can measure words and non-words, and the task is to decide whether they're a set of letters, or a word, or a non-word, and it's the ease with which words are recognized as words as against non-words. I'll begin by focusing on reaction time, because that's the simplest one.
Here's how it works: after the presentation of the word "sick", the number of words that are affected to which you react differently than you reacted before is enormous. You will be faster, obviously, to "ill", and to "death", and so on, but it will be "hospital", and it will be "nurse", and it will be "doctor", and all of a sudden you've got a huge range of things to which the response is influenced by just presenting that one thing. We find that associative networks that we have in our minds appear to be a lot richer than it did before.
But that's not the only thing that happens. It turns out that the kinds of associations that are built in are a lot richer than we thought. When I want to make an impression while giving a talk, I put the word "vomit" on the screen. Just imagine the word "vomit" on the screen. I point out we know from experiments what happens to people within the first second or two that the word "vomit" is present. In the first place there is that enormous range of changes in the associative structure, and the readiness as well. ...
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THE REALITY CLUB
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On "Two Big Things Happening In Psychology Today:
A Talk By Daniel Kahneman"
W. Daniel Hillis, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold, Richard Thaler
DANIEL KAHNEMAN: Let me postulate a few things:
1) I know my date of birth. Priming will not change my mind about it.
2) I do not believe there is anything anyone could do within the law to make me vote for a Republican this November.
So yes, of course there are limits to priming effects and to all forms of influence. My point was not that priming can make a person do anything at all. It was that priming has much more influence than people think it could have. Furthermore, people are generally not aware of having been influenced. [MORE...]
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Priming as Danny presents it is quite a strange phenomenon:
* Omnipresent-happening all the time, all around you.
* Impossible to guard against.
* Equally hard to detect-in yourself anyway, but also in others (unless you have a control group and can do the statistics, as one does in an experiment).
* Very important to understanding human perception.
* Also very important in terms of real world impact on thinking and decisions, with large real-world consequences.
I'm pretty sure Danny said each of these, one way or another. Or maybe I was just primed to draw these conclusions myself, but I think they are accurate.
If find that set of characteristics to be fascinating. However, they are also strange, and perhaps a bit alarming if you really take them seriously. It very naturally begs a set of other questions. [...MORE]
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IN THE NEWS
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THE GUARDIAN
Comment Is Free
ALL ABOARD THE ATHEIST BUS CAMPAIGN
It's real, it's happening: you can sponsor the first atheist advert on a bus - and Richard Dawkins will match your money
By Ariane Sherine
[bus photo caption: The godless move in mysterious ways: what the atheist bus campaign's advert will look like.]
The atheist bus campaign launches today thanks to Comment is free readers. Because of your enthusiastic response to the idea of a reassuring God-free advert being used to counter religious advertising, the slogan "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life" could now become an ad campaign on London buses - and leading secularists have jumped on board to help us raise the money.
The British Humanist Association will be administering all donations to the campaign, and Professor Richard Dawkins, bestselling author of The God Delusion, has generously agreed to match all contributions up to a maximum of £5,500, giving us a total of £11,000 if we raise the full amount. This will be enough to fund two sets of atheist adverts on 30 London buses for four weeks.
If the buses hit the road, this will be the UK's first ever atheist advertising campaign. It's an exciting development, which I never expected when I first proposed the idea on Cif in June. Back then, I was just keen to counter the religious ads running on public transport, which featured a URL to a website telling non-Christians they would spend "all eternity in torment in hell", burning in "a lake of fire". ...
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
The DNA Age - Taking a Peek at the Experts' Genetic Secrets
By Amy Harmon
Is Esther Dyson, the technology venture capitalist who is training to be an astronaut, genetically predisposed to a major heart attack?
Does Steven Pinker, the prominent psychologist and author, have a gene variant that raises his risk of Alzheimer's, which his grandmother suffered from, to greater than 50 percent?...
...On Monday, they may learn the answers to these and other questions - and, if all goes according to plan, so will everyone else who cares to visit a public Web site, www.personalgenomes.org. The three are among the first 10 volunteers in the Personal Genome Project, a study at Harvard University Medical School aimed at challenging the conventional wisdom that the secrets of our genes are best kept to ourselves. ...
...The project is as much a social experiment as a scientific one. "We don't yet know the consequences of having one's genome out in the open," said George M. Church, a human geneticist at Harvard who is the project's leader and one of its subjects. "But it's worth exploring." ...
...J. Craig Venter, a pioneer in human genome sequencing, said his nonprofit institute planned to sequence several dozen human genomes by the end of next year and to deposit the information in the public domain along with phenotype information in a model similar to that of the PGP. He said he had already heard from thousands of volunteers.
...And Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, recently revealed on his blog that he learned he has a considerably higher than average risk of developing Parkinson's disease, which was diagnosed in his mother several years ago. (Mr. Brin is the husband of Anne Wojcicki, a co-founder of 23 and Me.)
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Further Reading on Edge: "Life: What A Concept!" [8.27.07] (George Church, J. Craig Venter et al); "George Church: Constructive Biology" [6.26.06]
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THE ATLANTIC
Why Washington's crusade against swearing on the airwaves is f*cked up
By Steven Pinker
A WORD IS an arbitrary label that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don't snicker: Would you ever say "Nothing has gone wrong yet" without looking for wood to knock?
Swearing is another kind of word magic. People believe, contrary to logic, that certain words can corrupt the moral order-that piss and Shit! and fucking are dangerous in a way that pee and Shoot! and freakin' are not. This quirk in our psychology lies in the ability of taboo words to activate primitive emotional circuits in the brain.
My interest in swearing is (I swear) scientific. But swearing is not just a puzzle in cognitive neuroscience. It has figured in the most-famous free-speech cases of the past century, from Ulysses and Lady Chatterley to those of Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. Over the decades, the courts have steadily driven government censors into a precarious redoubt. In 1978, the Supreme Court, ruling on a daytime broadcast of Carlin's "Filthy Words" monologue, allowed the Federal Communications Commission to regulate "indecency" on broadcast radio and television during the hours when children were likely to be listening. The rationale, based on rather quaint notions of childhood and of modern media, was that over-the-air broadcasts are uninvited intruders into the home and can expose children to indecent language, harming their psychological and moral development.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Downturn's Upside
By Nicholas D. Kristof
Income doesn't have much to do with happiness. Americans haven't become any happier as they have prospered in the last half-century. And winning the lottery doesn't make people happier in the long term.
This is called the Easterlin Paradox: Once they have met their basic needs, people don't become happier as they become richer. In recent years, new research has undermined the Easterlin Paradox, yet it's still true that happiness has less to do with money than with friendships and finding meaning in a cause larger than oneself.
"There's pretty good evidence that money doesn't matter much for how you feel moment to moment," said Alan Krueger, a Princeton University economist who is conducting extensive research on happiness. "What seems to matter much more is having good friends and family, and time to spend on social activities."
The big exception to all this is people who lose their jobs or homes, and the new president should act immediately to help them. Professor Krueger argues that for these people, the losses are greater than we have generally realized, for their losses are not only monetary but also the erosion of self-esteem and friendships as they are wrenched out of social networks that enrich their lives (and help them find new jobs). And for those who lose health insurance, a medical or dental problem is enormously stressful, even life-threatening.
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NATURE
The Cranial Endoskeleton of Tiktaalik Roseae
By Jason P. Downs, Edward B. Daeschler, Farish A. Jenkins & Neil H. Shubin
Among the morphological changes that occurred during the 'fish-to-tetrapod' transition was a marked reorganization of the cranial endoskeleton. Details of this transition, including the sequence of character acquisition, have not been evident from the fossil record. Here we describe the braincase, palatoquadrate and branchial skeleton of Tiktaalik roseae, the Late Devonian sarcopterygian fish most closely related to tetrapods. Although retaining a primitive configuration in many respects, the cranial endoskeleton of T. roseae shares derived features with tetrapods such as a large basal articulation and a flat, horizontally oriented entopterygoid. Other features in T. roseae, like the short, straight hyomandibula, show morphology intermediate between the condition observed in more primitive fish and that observed in tetrapods. The combination of characters in T. roseae helps to resolve the relative timing of modifications in the cranial endoskeleton. The sequence of modifications suggests changes in head mobility and intracranial kinesis that have ramifications for the origin of vertebrate terrestriality.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Fish Fossil Yields Anatomical Clues on How Animals of the Sea Made It to Land
By John Noble Wilford
Fish Fossil Yields Anatomical Clues on How Animals of the Sea Made It to Land
By John Noble Wilford
In a new study of a fossil fish that lived 375 million years ago, scientists are finding striking evidence of the intermediate steps by which some marine vertebrates evolved into animals that walked on land. ...
...Several skeletons of the fish were excavated four years ago on Ellesmere Island, in the Nunavut Territory of Canada, 700 miles above the Arctic Circle, by a team led by Neil H. Shubin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum, and Ted Daeschler of the Academy of Natural Sciences. The Devonian Age rocks containing the fossils indicated that the fishapod lived in shallow waters of a warm climate. It may have made brief forays on land. ...
...Dr. Shubin said Tiktaalik was "still on the fish end of things, but it neatly fills a morphological gap and helps to resolve the relative timing of this complex transition."
For example, fish have no neck but "we see a mobile neck developing for the first time in Tiktaalik," Dr. Shubin said.
"When feeding, fish orient themselves by swimming, which is fine in deep water, but not for an animal whose body is relatively fixed, as on the bottom of shallow water or on land," he added. "Then a flexible neck is important."
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BLOGGINGHEADS.TV
John Horgan & David Berreby
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This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge262.html
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